In chess player strength is calculated by the ELO equation which is used by FIDE organization.
Arpad Elo a former USCF chess player and American physics professor introduced this statistical method which calculates the relative skill level in two player games. – This rating system has been adapted by some tennis freaks (wuornos & leapfrog) to compare all time greats in tennis! WOW!
For more information on the statistical ELO approach check out wikipedia (searching for “chess elo”).
The outcome (peak rating) for tennis greats so far is shown in the list below:

It’s not that surprising that Federer is on the top. More surprising is pistol Pete’s #8 position.
I’m aware that the elo system is just one more way of comparison. What can we learn from this? You can pull out as many comparison approaches as you want Roger Federer results on top. Geeeezzz!

Osaid

Interesting, Rafafan! From the result list, I see Djokovic, Pete and Murray have similar strength. If Djokovic and Murray do not win quite a bit more, the result may argue that Pete played in a chocolate era…

RafaFansaid

CHOCOLATE ERA! LOL! This is a good point O! I’ll do some statistical calculations with the top 100’s. I’ll compare the decades and post the results in a new “Wanna post” thread! :-) Maybe with the title: “A Statistical Chocolate Era Proof”! ;-) I’m quite curious whether a statistical difference can be proven! At least I hope for a wall of fame listing! LOL. I’m not kidding: The result is based on true data and proven mathematical relationships! Yeah! ;-) You know I’m sick of lame arguments!!! ;-)

Msaid

UM17said

Don’t you think each point in tennis is like a mini chess game? Cuz each point is a discrete entity, there’s no break in play between moves in chess, it just continues. I mean I see how a whole match could be like a chess game too, with the whole mental aspect, and how tides can turn…

Maxsaid

I’m just curious, where did you get the match database to run this? I just saw a link to it from a message board and thought it was totally cool, maybe a regular reader would already know the answer (do you run a site that keeps track of this, or is there some source you bought it from or what)

RafaFansaid

Max, thanks for your comment. The ELO calculation was done by “wuornos” and “leapfrog”. I found their results on another blog. I do not know the name of their source database. It could be “Tennis Navigator”, “OnTour” or even the stevegtennis site. I’m too busy to run a site that keeps track of the results.
I don’t think that inflation/deflation can be proven. In your Wikipedia link they say that the ELO rating for chess players rose from 2644 in July 2000 to 2689 in January 2010. I don’t think that 45 pts are enough for let’s say a P=0.99 (=highly significant). For the tennis elo’s I’ll do a a proper t-test (between the eras) and calculate Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient.